A man wearing a Robert Burns T-shirt walks into a pub and orders a pint. 'Robert Burns?' a voice inquires. The man turns, and there, at his side, finds a slightly bedraggled, very dreadlocked and definitely black chap. Taken aback, the man glances round the room, gathers himself and says: 'Eh, yeah. Scottish poet.' The dreadlocked one nods, leans forward and in a quiet but tremulous Ayrshire brogue says:

Wee sleekit, cow'rin' tim'rous beastie

Oh what a panic's in thy breastie!

Thou need na start awa sae hasty,

Wi bickerin' brattle!

I wad be laith tae run and chase thee

Wi murderin' pattle!

The man's eyes glaze, his jaw sags. This is the opening verse of 'To a Mouse', one of Burns's best-known poems. 'Jings!' he exclaims. 'Has the Bard made it all the way to Jamaica?'

Something like the above took place in Ladbroke Grove a couple of years ago. I know - I was the black chap. And while it's possible there are Burns societies in the Caribbean, I didn't learn his works there. What the man couldn't have known, was that when I was 10 I won a prize for recitation of 'To a Mouse' in a school competition in Orkney.

My family moved to the Orkneys from Lincolnshire in 1976. Mum had been offered a good job and it seemed an idyllic setting in which to bring up kids. With hindsight, a family like ours - white parents, one white child, one Asian child, two black children - was always going to attract attention in any community, but it was only when we arrived in the village of St Margaret's Hope on the island of South Ronaldsay that I began to fully appreciate how apparently different we were.

There wasn't much to St Margaret's Hope. It was a no-frills village that made few concessions to fashion, a stance borne out by the utilitarian ring of its place names. The Back Road was behind the Front Road; the Church Road had a church on it; the School Brae had a school at the top of it; the Pier Road, a pier at the end of it; the village café was called the Café; the Cromarty Square was home to the Cromarty Hall; the burn that flowed through the centre was called, the Burn.

The Front Road was all that lay between our house and the sea. Lincolnshire's mild Englishness had done nothing to prepare me for Orkney's wildly temperamental elements. Storms blew up out of nowhere, midnight at midday as thunderheads bore down on the chimney tops. I'd stand on the quayside marvelling at my own insignificance as explosions of sunlight set the seafront aglitter, and tumultuous waves sent boats rollercoasting round the bay.

Hills ringed round the village were treeless. A walk to the top of the highest of them revealed all the islands to be similarly bare, their names, still ringing with the Old Norse, a mystery to me: Switha, Glimps Holm, Papa Westray, Hoy. Awesome, beautiful and numinous though it was, my new home had a terrifying downside.

Shortly before I started school, I was playing in the back yard when a blond-haired boy called out to me in a beautiful singsong voice: 'Black cunt.' Black. I knew what that meant. Brown would have been more accurate, but why pick hairs? 'Cunt' I'd never heard before. But it sounded enough like currant for me to suppose it was an Orcadian take on that word. I worked through the implications. A currant is dried fruit. Food. So by calling me a cunt, he was saying something like: You're a peach! or You're a good egg! What hospitality, I thought. How vociferously extended!

On the first day of school, I found out exactly what a black cunt was. My (white) sister, Paisley, and I had hardly stepped through the gates when all hell broke loose. Dozens of kids rushed us. I lost Paisley in the mêlée. So many boys, some three times my size, dancing, hooting, pointing, screaming with gleeful fury: 'Black bastard! Sambo! Nig nog! Mohammad Ali! Rupert the Bear!' Rupert the Bear? There was no uniform, but Mum felt that jeans, worn by so many of the other kids, were just a bit too street so she'd sent me to school in some Rupert-the-Bear-style checked trousers. I was chased from one end of the playground to the other. Fists flew. The boy with the singsong voice turned out to be a sadistic psychopath. He and his mates trounced me on waste ground behind the Portakabin that doubled as the primary six classroom and gym hall. Tipped off by an already loyal few, Paisley charged to my rescue. She launched herself at the blond boy, jumped on his back, hauled him off me and ran for her life. Freed at last, I did likewise. We reached home that afternoon, battered, breathless, mud-spattered. Paisley took Mum aside and told her: 'You're going to have to buy Luke a pair of jeans.'

Denim became my armour. I buried my head in books. Thereafter, the most pressing of my problems stemmed from a handful of older boys. Whenever they swooped - as they very often did - swarms of kids, otherwise silent or civil, would swell their ranks and cheer them on. Anyone with distinguishing features was at risk; pity the lazy-eyed, the hook-nosed, the buck-toothed, the bespectacled. But the real acid of island bile was reserved for a group, the mere whiff of which, seemed able to reduce even the most moderate Orcadian to fits of rage - the English. Exasperated by the strictures of modern urban life, some clinging to withering hippy ideals of getting back to nature, self-sufficiency and even earth magick, they'd come to Orkney in their hundreds, seeking nothing less than Elysium. Oh the dismay when they realised that the natives weren't quite the noble savages they'd imagined. For a sizeable minority, back to nature meant sending any foreigner to an early grave, self-sufficiency boiled down to driving yourself home when you were too legless to walk, while earth magick referred to the antics of mischievous sprites who'd surface every Halloween to throw fireworks through your windows, scrawl graffiti on your walls and execute your pets with airguns.

Not only was my family a miniature melting pot, we hailed from England. What saved us from the worst was my parents' nationality - they are both (lowland) Scottish - and their value to the community. As a health visitor, Mum tended to all the young mums (and some of the young guns), and if anyone needed their eyes tested, chances were they'd go to see my dad in Kirkwall. Not that their standing was a guarantee of immunity; they themselves were harangued by other mothers and fathers, appalled that they'd adopted black kids.

Elsewhere, hospitality was overwhelming. Every once in a while, guests would drop by the house to help out or say hello. When we ran out of gas one Christmas Day, a neighbour brought us a fresh canister (which he fitted) and a chicken (which he plucked and gutted). Fishermen would leave excess catch on our doorstep. There were those who openly hoped we adopted kids would stay on and marry islanders.

Over time I managed to make in-roads with the boys a rung down from the out-and-out bullies. They were wild cards, quick to turn, but if I wanted easier passage, I'd have to get to know them. Boom boxes blazing with AC/DC and Queen, their ages ranging from eight to 18, they'd congregate by the pier next to our house, drinking, smoking, spitting and swearing. I couldn't afford to let my guard down for a second, so drinking was out from the off - the beer tasted like dishwater anyway - and as an asthmatic, smoking was suicide. But I became an above-average spitter, and an enthusiastic swearer. Between drinking binges and spitting competitions, we'd fish off the end of the pier, play Space Invaders at the Café, row boats out into the bay where we'd sunbathe to soundtracks of deafening metal. Every once in a while, a collective madness would take hold, the air fizzing with out-of-season fireworks, bullets, boulders and flames. I came out of the house one night to find a commotion on the Front Road, boys zipping up and down on their bikes, screaming with almost hysterical excitement. Along the street, I saw the reason for their joy. One of the older boys, known for being something of a loner, a killer of crabs, a murderer of birds, had nailed a 12-pound cod to the door of a shed and was using it as an archery target. While his bow was a professional-issue model, his arrow - rough-hewn, flightless, as thick as the butt of a pool cue - was defiantly homemade.

At Halloween this madness was visited upon our family and other select residents. I always hoped my association with the in-crowd would inspire some loyalty, but it never did. More often than not, I'd play the part of silent spectator while armies of darkness bombarded our house.

I developed an intense ambivalence about Orkney and its people. On one hand I felt very much a native and was treated as such, while on the other, I was denied the possibility of real integration because of my perceived otherness. Books I'd used as a means of escape became central to my efforts to find a context for myself. I delved into local history, sagas, mythology and science and found proof of a fragmented world populated by anomalies. Laws governing culture, nationality, race, and sometimes, even physics, crumbled as stories wove themselves into the day to day. Orkney, with its stone circles, tombs and scuttled battleships, was a land of living myth, home to heroes, saints and shape-shifting selkies.

Magick was never far away. One autumn afternoon, as our class was preparing for assembly, one friend - who'd abstained from taking part on the grounds of his religious denomination - promised me he'd summon an almighty shower of hail. We filed into the gym hall and began our hymn singing. Two minutes in, something cracked against the window. Singers exchanged glances. Someone mouthed the word 'Hail', and what sounded like a few thousand tons of the stuff was promptly dumped on top of us. Every voice succumbed to the thundering. The Portakabin shuddered as though angels were throwing a rowdy ceilidh on the roof.

Many of the men and boys who roamed this magickal island were equally mythic. There were those able to drink their own bodyweight in beer; concrete-stomached fishermen who took to sea without lifejackets or swimming lessons in the hope they'd die quickly if pitched overboard; coiffured boy-racers in souped-up Escorts and Cortinas, who thought nothing of racing across the Churchill Barriers in the face of 40-foot waves. George Mackay Brown sums up the lives of these supermen in his book, An Orkney Tapestry:

Once he disputed

The Kame with an eagle,

His two lambs

Fluttering on a sea ledge...

That storm in [18]'75

When Swift and Dolphin drowned

He beached in Lewis

Up to the thwart in haddocks...

In jail twice

For drunk fighting...

Twelve bairns called him da

In Flotta and Hoy.

Three sat at his lawful table...

And he broke six rocks

Before his plough

Stitched on the bog and heather and stone of Moorfea

One green square...

He was at the whaling a winter...

An old silver man

He reads his bible now

And yawns a bit.

Luckily my dad was made of similar stuff. Telepathy, star-sign synchronicity, whatever, his brand of divine intervention worked. I can think of a few occasions on which Paisley and/or I had our backs to the wall and Dad would appear, something quite heroic in all balding, bearded five-foot four of him. Close my eyes and I see bullies flung headfirst into snowdrifts, lynch mobs fleeing at the advancing echo of his footsteps. This mingling of history, myth and modernity was the lifeblood of my primary six teacher. A bushy-bearded man-mountain who considered the English the Auld Enemy, he regaled us with tales of William Wallace, Robert the Bruce and the continuing wars of independence. I identified with the Scottish cause, bristled with a measure of patriotic pride, struggled with what seemed to me to be a glaring contradiction: why were these people, so acquainted with the trauma of being trampled underfoot, so quick to savage me?

The man-mountain turned us on to the poetry of Robert Burns. I took his lyrics to heart - 'Scots Wha Hae', 'To a Mouse', 'A Man's a Man For A' That' - winning prizes for my recitals. Armed with a recorder, I reduced locals to blubbering ruin during school concerts with solo renditions of Bright Eyes and the theme from The Deer Hunter. Meanwhile, Dad plied me with a diet of new sounds - Stravinsky, Louis Armstrong, David Munro - perfect complement to the likes of Blondie, Gary Numan and Michael Jackson who dominated the radio.

But as quickly as my horizons expanded, they'd shrink. Everyone watched Alex Haley's TV series Roots. For anyone with an agenda, here were my roots, my history and my culture, not to mention a brand-new epithet: nigger. The connectedness I felt to Orkney counted for little. Informed by precious few precedents, views I encountered could be blinkered, but I played up to them in a gruelling attempt to avoid persecution. As I was watching Tiswas one morning, Lenny Henry, wearing a phallic beanie, leapt onto the screen and bellowed: 'OOOO-KAAAYYYY!' Cereal stuck in my throat. A premonition of the inevitable knock-on had me trying frantically to nail the nuances of the catchphrase. Burns was no problem, I could even muster a decent Orcadian accent, but this West Indian caricature was utterly beyond me. Hours later, everyone was at it: skinny, white boys, descendants of Vikings, barking pitch-perfect Caribbean patois. Whenever I tried to match them, they'd fall about laughing, whether 'with' me, or at the unfathomable inferiority of my impersonation, I was never quite sure.

I expended all my energy deflecting attention by telling racist jokes and daring more than even the most deranged headcases. Any night of the week, I could be seen scarpering from scenes of carnage and arson, my tiny Afro a beacon among a dozen golden mullets. Word got back to Mum. She fielded my hooliganism with a dizzying mix of wrath and compassion. The ferocity with which she'd protect us was as frightening as it was inspiring. She'd face down crazies without breaking sweat and could bring you to your knees with pure patience.

And then everything changed. My first year at the grammar school in Kirkwall was a revelation. I made new friends for whom my blackness was only slightly more remarkable than the sky's blueness. My grades improved. Our football team crawled back up the league finishing fourth. A teacher saw me playing and asked me to run on school sports day. I won the 100 and 200 metres in my football boots. One of my most persistent bullies ceased hostilities with the words: 'It's just a tan.' All this and parties galore crowned by a show-stopping robotics routine and my first full-on kiss.

Almost without warning, it was over. Just as my life was beginning to improve, we moved away. At the time, I didn't want to leave. Looking back now, it was the right thing to do. Twenty years on, I'm pining again. Orkney might have finished me, but instead it made me. I miss it.